The Unfixed Stars

Michael Byers has crafted a fictionalised account of the discovery of the planet Pluto in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh. Like many other recent works of fiction, including my reviewed Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, Byers has woven a tale of fiction around living characters. Also like Spufford's work, the characters are a long while deceased, enabling greater freedoms and literary license. Unlike Spufford however, Byers doesn't take the trouble to signpost to the reader where fact ends and fiction begins.

This can be perceived as problematic. A cursory glance at Tombaugh's Wiki entry suggests that broadly the chronology of events at Lowell Observatory during the late 1920s and early 1930s has been accurately interlaced into the narrative. However it is less easy to delineate fact and fiction when Byers develops the characters involved in the process of the planet's discovery; early on I decided to take no risks and assumed the protagonists were imaginary.

This development is the main thrust of the novel - Byers is saying that Pluto was discovered by Tombaugh through an extraordinary set of circumstances brought in to play by these fictional characters. For instance, a vacancy became available at Lowell purely because the incumbent astronomer eloped with a flighty Newtonian mathematician at coincidentally the same time as Tombaugh a dirt-poor Kansas farm boy, was sending a speculative letter to the observatory pleading for a job. Curiously, Tombaugh didn't write to other observatories, and Lowell at the time had a policy of only hiring college undergraduates. Despite these factors, Lowell was hired to conduct the search for Planet X under very little supervision and his dogged determination ultimately proved fruitful.

The Unfixed Stars is Byers' first novel. At times the book is dense and terse and not an easy read. Byers has probably written the book to win literary awards at the cost of readability. Other first-timers have fallen into the same trap - even the great Len Deighton did the same with The Ipcress Files. Perhaps a little leadership from the editor at the publishing house would have made reading the book less of a chore and more of an experience to be cherished.